A fast algorithm for multi-group multicast beamforming in large-scale wireless systems

Abstract

Multi-group multicast beamforming in wireless systems with large antenna arrays and massive audience is investigated in this paper. Multicast beamforming design is a well-known non-convex quadratically constrained quadratic programming (QCQP) problem. A recent attempt is to apply convex-concave procedure (CCP) to find a stationary solution, whose complexity, however, increases dramatically as the problem size increases. In this paper, we propose a low-complexity highperformance algorithm for multi-group multicast beamforming design in large-scale wireless systems by utilizing the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) together with CCP. In specific, the original non-convex QCQP problem is first approximated by a sequence of convex subproblems via CCP. Each convex subproblem is then reformulated as a novel ADMM form. Our ADMM reformulation enables that each updating step is performed by solving multiple small-size subproblems with closed-form solutions in parallel. Numerical results show that our fast algorithm maintains the same favorable performance as state-of-the-art algorithms but reduces the complexity by orders of magnitude.